Trump’s Military Ambition: Raw Power as a Means and an End

American sailors aboard the guided-missile cruiser Chancellorsville in the South China Sea last year. President Trump’s plans for a military buildup seem aimed at great powers like China.Credit...Bryan Denton for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s vision of American power, something of a mystery during the campaign, has come into new focus after a week of speeches and budget plans hinting at his ambitions for the military.

They reveal a president fascinated with raw military might, which he sees as synonymous with America’s standing in the world and as a tool to coerce powerful rivals, such as China and Iran, which appear to be his primary concern.

He also appears little-focused on the details of America’s continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria and globally against Al Qaeda. None of those missions will be resolved by the new aircraft carriers Mr. Trump has promised, and generals warn that they will be set back by his proposals to slash funding for diplomacy and aid.

This may not necessarily be an oversight on Mr. Trump’s part, analysts suggest, but rather flow from a nationalistic worldview that is unfamiliar today but dominated the geopolitics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

That may be revealed most clearly in Mr. Trump’s vision of victory.

He has portrayed the military’s primary role as winning battles, and winning battles as sufficient for winning wars — two ideas out of favor since at least the Vietnam War. Ever since then, most generals have emphasized that war is driven by political conflicts that can rarely be resolved through force alone.

“We will give our military the tools you need to prevent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing. You know what that is? Win. Win,” Mr. Trump said this week.

It is perhaps early to say whether his views cohere into a single Trump doctrine. But they suggest a pursuit of policies that seem less suited to any particular strategy or conflict than to a view of military power as its own end.

An Older Way of War

Mr. Trump has mostly expressed his military thinking through calls to build up major weapons systems, such as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons, designed to fight major wars.

Michael C. Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist, said, “That does mean a military force more optimized for potential conflict with China, with Iran and, ironically, with Russia.”

Every president has worked to retain military superiority over major adversaries. But Mr. Trump is unusually single-minded in his focus on preparing for great power conflict, which the world has averted since World War II.

This echoes the beliefs of Stephen K. Bannon, a senior adviser whose nationalist ideology traditionally sees great power conflict as inevitable.

“We’re going to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years,” Mr. Bannon said in a March 2016 radio broadcast. “There’s no doubt about that.”

When Mr. Trump said this week that he would equip the Navy to “win” a war, he probably sought only to demonstrate his faith in the military. But the comment has deepened the impression that Mr. Trump may consider modern great power conflict to be winnable, an idea that has been out of favor since the first years of the Cold War, when nuclear deterrence made it unthinkable.

Mr. Trump’s focus on great power conflict and military might may come quite literally at the expense of unconventional wars, which the United States is still fighting in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

To fund his military expansion, Mr. Trump has asked to cut billions that would probably come out of State Department and foreign aid programs. This would gut American strategy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, which relies on diplomacy and political efforts such as building schools and training police forces.

It is unclear whether this is because Mr. Trump plans to withdraw from those wars or because he rejects the underlying premise of those programs: that war is primarily a political problem and can be won only by solving the underlying political issues — for example, in Afghanistan, the absence of a strong, central state.

Instead, Mr. Trump seems to take an older, more nationalistic view, in which might is the final deciding factor in any conflict. He has not articulated how this will lead to victory in the grueling counterinsurgency campaigns across the Middle East.

Weaponry as Stagecraft

Most administrations arrive at military spending priorities through a three-step process: Identify what problems they want to solve, determine the strategy that will solve them and, finally, buy the equipment necessary to enact that strategy.

Mr. Trump appears to have run that process backward.

“I don’t think we should assume that Trump’s military spending is linked to a military strategy,” said Erin Simpson, a national security consultant who served as an adviser to the military in Afghanistan.

Why not?

“He hasn’t had time to conduct a full strategy review,” she said. But Mr. Trump has nonetheless called for building new aircraft carriers and nuclear capabilities.

This may help explain why he has not articulated strategies for fighting Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, or for containing China: Military might, in his view, translates directly into power, and power into victory.

This would dovetail with Mr. Trump’s emphasis on showmanship, stagecraft and above all negotiation.

“I think he sees force as performative. The utility of force is in its demonstration,” Ms. Simpson said.

American doctrine has long called for deterring war through military dominance, what ancient Romans termed “peace through strength.”

But Mr. Trump has called for proliferating high-priced assets such as aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons without always articulating a specific goal, suggesting he sees them as ends in themselves.

In this view, it would not be necessary to explain what capabilities the United States acquires with an expanded Navy or how those capabilities can be brought to bear in, say, Somalia. Nor would it be necessary to develop strategies for the complex information and cyberwars of tomorrow. Strength itself will prevail.

Symbols of Strength

Mr. Trump’s emphasis on great power conflict and high-priced assets also solves, deliberately or not, a political problem that bedeviled both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations: Fighting insurgencies is messy, costly and often unwinnable in any traditional sense.

Strategists will long debate the best way to tackle those conflicts, but politicians in both parties seem to have given up on making them anything but political millstones.

Instead, Mr. Trump has chosen a battle that the United States, as the world’s richest country, can more reliably win: that of military buildup.

But his planned $54 billion spending increase appears to be “a budget in search of a strategy,” Ms. Simpson said.

Unless the spending is the strategy.

He has called for a nuclear “arms race,” for instance, though even in the Cold War, arms racing was not a deliberate strategy but rather a byproduct of a nuclear competition neither side saw as desirable.

Mr. Trump, though still a novice in policy terms, has shown a flair for symbols and showmanship. By building the world’s most expensive weapons systems, he repurposes them as symbols of power.

That performance, Mr. Horowitz suggested, might be for American adversaries as well as Mr. Trump’s own supporters, to whom he has promised a return of American strength and confidence.

“When he thinks about the military, he probably thinks about the tangible representations of the military,” Mr. Horowitz said, calling the advanced weapons “signals of strength.”

He added, “I suspect that’s not so different from the way that a lot of the American public thinks about military power.”